Late-Stage Capitalism Looks Pretty Until It's Not
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| Fifth Avenue, NYC, 1978. |
The movie Charley Varrick, starring Walter Matthau, came out in 1973. Charley is a pilot. He had been working as a stunt flyer, but gives it up as too dangerous. Then he works as a crop duster, billing himself as the Last of the Independents. He gets crushed by the bigger organizations, and so he decides to take up bank robbing. He and a few associates, including his wife, rob a small bank in New Mexico, and things rapidly spin out of control. I watched the movie again after a lapse of half a century. It's a really good movie. I won't spoil it for you.
Why am I writing about this? Charley is just looking for a better way, and that's what this story is about.
For those of you who weren't around, the state of America in 1973 wasn't particularly peachy. The war in Vietnam was still grinding on. The Pentagon Papers, published in 1971, basically destroyed my faith in our government. Nixon was still president, but the Watergate scandal, beginning in 1972, finished the job as far as I was concerned. And then we had the 1973 Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, followed by the oil embargo and the great inflation morphing into a combination of inflation and economic stagnation, and Americans got to learn a new word: stagflation.
I could go on. But I won't. Well, one more. In 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War. They killed four people. So when people were surprised when ICE and the border patrol started killing people in Minneapolis earlier this year, I wasn't surprised. Shocked, yes. Surprised, no.
Charley Varrick wasn't the only one looking for a better way, but as a society it felt like we were stuck in the mud. And any search for a better way always seemed to wind up going awry.
The search for a better way is central to Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind. I wrote about this book recently (see Fixing the Constitution), where I concentrated on the period before World War I and the ways that the constitution could be improved. What I basically jumped over in that story was the question of why it is so hard, in present-day America, to implement improvements to our government and indeed our whole society. This article is about our country's search, during the twentieth century, for a better way.
Manichaeism
Let's start with the Cold War. From its inception in 1947, the Cold War was central to the frozen state of politics globally. It was a fight between capitalist democracy and communist dictatorship.
Rana describes this face-off as Manichaean, and he's right. Good and bad duke it out. (He has a whole section on pages 439-443 entitled International Police Power in a Manichaean World.)
For those of you who are not up on your heresies, Manichaeism was an early Christian heresy which held that evil had an independent existence, and that the outcome of the struggle between good and evil was not a foregone conclusion. The first seven words of the Apostles' Creed are "I believe in God the father almighty," so if you believe that the devil may in fact come out on top, you're a heretic.
This heresy keeps cropping up over the course of history, perhaps because it seems to correlate better with observed reality. In the middle ages, there were the Cathars, or Albigensians, in the south of France, who had a significant effect on the development of both the church and the kingdom of France. (If you'd like to know a lot more about this, see Submerged Narratives.)
The trick with heresies is that both sides believe they're right. So the good guys versus the bad guys, but both sides think they're the good guys. (Extraneous comment: I find this word Manichaean difficult to spell. I've found out that there was a fellow named Mani. That helps me a little.)
Back to the twentieth century, where we will start by looking at some developments in Europe.
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| Grocer, Canal street, 1979. |
The year 1968 was an interesting one around the world. Mark Kurlansky has written an entire book about it, naturally called 1968 (it was published in 2004). French students almost overthrew the French government. In the United States, the Democratic party did its best to commit suicide at its national convention in Chicago. And just about everywhere, it seems, people were looking for and demanding a better way. And the forces of order were attempting to restore order and suppress new ideas. (For what follows, see Kurlansky, pp. 22, 25-37, 238-250, 287-305, 375-377.)
One of the more interesting places where new ideas were bubbling to the surface was Czechoslovakia, where a life-long communist and party apparatchik named Alexander Dubcek found himself riding herd on a country that was effectively undergoing a revolution. He had replaced a hardliner who refused to de-Stalinize fifteen years after Stalin's death - party leaders had sensed they were losing the people and they thought Dubcek might be the fellow to manage a few reforms and keep the people in place. Things turned out differently.
The reforms built on one another, and all of a sudden people were talking about a third way - neither capitalism nor communism, but something that looked a lot like the social democracy that was periodically influential in a number of capitalist countries in the west, including the United States during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In April 1968, Dubcek issued the Action Program of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, calling for "a new model of socialist democracy" (Kurlansky, p. 242). In this "socialism with a human face" the party advocated a general relaxation of the party's control of the society, encouraging public participation in politics, decentralizing the economy, and granting a measure of autonomy to various parts of the government, including the judicial system.
Moscow viewed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia as an existential threat, and on August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. The bulk of the forces involved were Soviet, but satellite states in eastern Europe also contributed troops. The Prague Spring was over.
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| Lower east side, 1979. |
Cassandra
Cassandra was a princess in the city of Troy, a long time ago. She was a seer, and she predicted that Troy would lose the coming war with the Greeks. What did Cassandra see? She was the only one in Troy who bothered to see the present clearly. Her assessment of the present led to her assessment of the future. Nobody believed her, but she turned out to be right. (See Wolf, p. 238.)
Here is the basic question that Wolf asks of Cassandra: How did a big, rich, well defended, and reasonably well run country find itself mired in a ten-year war that results in the defeat and annihilation of that country?
What Cassandra sees is the gradual destruction of Troy from the inside. Ten years of war turned Troy into a society that was focused almost entirely on war. And that new society was what we would now call a security state.
Wolf was quite familiar with security states and how they are built. She grew up under the Nazis and then spent most of her adult life in East Germany, a communist state with a secret police called the Stasi. She uses her knowledge to produce an eerie description of the slow, gradual changes inside Troy. In the end King Priam, Cassandra's father, has become an irrelevant figurehead largely manipulated by a young man named Eumelos who has come to control the now-gigantic security apparatus. (Eumelos first appears on page 45. I found him strongly reminiscent of Stephen Miller, President Trump's deputy chief of staff.)
All of this is made up, of course. Wolf is writing a novel. She respects the ancient sources, but is not bound by them. As she puts it, "The Troy I have in mind is not a description of bygone days but a model for a kind of utopia." (P. 224.) As for Cassandra: "Who was Cassandra before people wrote about her?" (P. 287.)
In the end, the fall of Troy is a very depressing story. But Wolf does not leave us without hope. Just as the ancients gave us Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, out of the ruins of Troy and going on to found Rome, Wolf also brings us a lesson of hope. There is a third way.
Cassandra has a circle of friends, mostly women, who gather to discuss the events of the day and to wonder about the future. During one of these discussions, a woman says, "Between killing and dying there is a third alternative: living." (P. 118.)
It appears that this was an idea that actually occurred to the ancient Greeks. In one of her essays, Wolf quotes the Greek poet Sappho (pp. 295-296): "One man praises horsemen as the most beautiful treasure / of the dark earth, another foot soldiers, / another fleets of ships, but I say it is / what a lover longs for."
So maybe governments should stop fighting wars and instead focus on serving the people. An interesting idea.
I think we're getting close to the American declaration of independence here. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as government priorities.
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| 3 card monte, Lexington ave. near Grand Central. November 1978. |
Two Third Ways Then and Now
As I noted above, people have generally thought of the third way as some kind of a middle point between capitalism and communism. But Wolf points us to another third way - between killing and dying.
And why were the Greeks and the Trojans killing and dying? The traditional answer was that the war was about Helen,"the face that launched a thousand ships." Modern historians have tended to focus more on two strong entities battling for control of the Aegean, and also control of access to the Black Sea. Troy was located near the Dardanelles strait and therefore in a position to block access to the Black Sea. (And, yes, we have an echo with the strait of Hormuz.)
What we have here is a conflict between two major powers seeking to dominate the center of the world they knew. I'd like to draw a straight line from the Trojan War to the Cold War between the United States (and its allies) and the Soviet Union (and its allies).
The conflict between the U.S. and the USSR was strongly ideological, but it was also a conflict for domination between two expanding empires. There was one spot, however, where the interests of the two sides coincided. They were both ruthless in their suppression of any hint at a third way.
The Constitution as a Cold-War Weapon
One of the most important tools that the United States had, in both its confrontation with the Russians and its suppression of any domestic third way, was the U.S. constitution.
Why is it such a powerful tool? Because it can be used to take the moral high ground, allowing everyday Americans to assume that they are the good guys and, by extension, their government is composed of good guys who may occasionally do bad things in pursuit of ultimate good.
The constitution did not always have that power. It's true that reverence for the constitution has a long history. As I mentioned in Fixing the Constitution, Rana starts the story of the "creedal constitution" with Abraham Lincoln in 1838. But Rana is also careful to note that constitutional veneration "did not enjoy a mass political base before World War I." (Rana, p. 219.) In fact, "The years between the 1887 centennial [of the constitution] and the 1917 American entry into Word War I were defined by extreme discord and by a striking popular willingness to engage in broad-ranging legal-political experimentation." (P. 45.)
Then, with World War I, the rapid rise of the security state, and the development of a massive propaganda apparatus, it all came together: "militarism, constitutional devotion, and unquestioned allegiance to the constitutional state." (P. 303.)
Getting there had been a long process, and Rana helps us follow it by tracking the evolution in Woodrow Wilson's thought. On July 4, 1876, the future U.S. president was a 19-year-old student at Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) when he wrote in his diary: "The one hundredth anniversary of American independence. ... How much happier she would be now if she had England's form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. ... I venture to say that this republic will never celebrate another centennial as a republic. The English form of government is the only true one." (Pp. 39, 121.)
Wilson earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. In 1885 he published a book entitled Congressional Government, which was based on his dissertation research. In the book he noted that "free, outspoken, unrestrained constitutional criticism" had become commonplace in the country and suggested that the current generation was "the first to entertain ... serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions compared with the systems of Europe." (Pp. 84, 102.)
Then something happened. Wilson began to shift his position. Although he was not yet willing to praise the eternal wisdom of the document, he was willing to suggest that the flaws were overstated. This dance continued for a while, but headed steadily to the position he took during his presidency: the constitution may be flawed, but it is sacred. (See pages 88, 124-125, 130, 211-215.)
Was this evolution helped by Wilson's increasing experience with executive power? After 1900 he served consecutively as president of Princeton university (1902-1910), governor of New Jersey (1911-1913), and president of United States (1913-1921). Personally, I'm inclined to think so.
There's something called Potomac fever. Power is a drug; some people handle it better than others.
By 1916, the pilgrimage was over. Wilson found himself fully on board with the creedal constitution. As Rana puts it, "For Wilson, the Constitution had its weaknesses, but now he also presented it as a sacred document, the product of centuries of cultural development and proof of the country's universal mission on the global stage." (P. 215.)
Wilson's government did its best to make sure everyone else was also on board with this project. The propaganda of the day strikes me as a bit over the top, but then I think the same about the fascist propaganda emanating from the White House today.
A fellow named William Tyler Page won a contest for writing something called "The American's Creed." Rana tells us that Page saw the document he wrote as an American version of the Apostles' Creed. The declaration of independence and the constitution "were to him 'my American bible', sacred and holy texts that should not be critically interrogated but instead accepted unconditionally and on faith." (Pp. 235-236.)
Can we not see here a parallel with the religiosity of today's white christian nationalists? It's true they simply dispense with the constitution and go directly to the bible, but the underlying thought is the same: Government must have a divine origin, and not simply come from the people who live in the country, pay the taxes, and die in the wars.
And that crossroads is pretty much where we are today.
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| Lexington ave. near Grand Central. June 1978. |
Suppressing Socialism
We've seen above how the Russians responded to the Prague Spring and its third-way action plan. The U.S. also used the power of its security state and the sense of righteousness it got from the constitution to effectively destroy efforts to build a third way in the home of the brave and the land of the free.
The government did this by effectively ignoring who the socialists were and what they had done, in the United States and other countries. Instead, they insisted that all socialists were actually Stalinists in sheep's clothing. The security state sold the Manichaean deal to the American people, and socialism was squeezed out of the middle.
As Rana puts it, "American officials and commentators focused on accentuating the contrast between the United States and the Soviet Union, in ways that reframed the meaning of past events. A long line of American socialists may have understood their politics as driven by an effort to truly combine constitutionalism and democracy." (Pp. 424-425.)
What they thought didn't matter. Bye-bye, third way.
The downside of this elimination of the middle was ossification. Ideologically, our ability to change was crimped severely. There was simply a shortage of new ideas, although there was no shortage of old ideas that had been stymied. Universal health care is a good example.
And it's possible that we were addicted to great-power conflict. The idea that we might be better off not fighting forever wars bumped up against the assumption that empire was not just an obligation but also an opportunity.
Recently, it appears that our empire is crumbling. And, as far as I can see, we have no idea how to navigate the choppy waters we find ourselves in. Who knew that aircraft carriers would join battleships in the white elephant corral?
But, like Cassandra, I want to leave you with a little piece of hope. Give some thought to what Zohran Mamdani has done in New York City in five months.
There is a better way.
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| Anti-nuclear graffiti, NYC, 1979. |
When I came across this no-nukes slide a while ago, I remembered it, and I knew it was located at the site of what became Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. I didn't - and don't - remember anything else. Somehow, though, I did manage to get myself there and take a picture.
The sand you're looking at sits on top of a massive amount of spoil from excavations that were required for the World Trade Center and New York City Water Tunnel #3, and from some other projects. The sand itself was dredged from New York harbor off of Staten Island.
New Yorkers know a beach when they see one, and promptly started arriving with towels and umbrellas and lying down in the sun. There were also a variety of art installations, and other activities including a massive no-nukes rally in response to the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. Almost 200,000 people attended on September 23, 1979.
(If you're willing to deal with a paywall, the New York Times has a very nice 2019 story looking back at the good times on the beach. To see it, click here.)
See also Fixing the Constitution, The Roots of the Republic, Pandora's Box, Never Give Your Opponent the Battle He Seeks, Somotomo, How the Dam Breaks, Is Stephen Miller the Next Reinhard Heydrich?
